Night and Day Quotes

“More recently, the OED has defined nostalgia as a “sentimental longing for the past,” although this definition is imperfect and allows considerable latitude for the negative. After all, a sentimental longing for the past has variously given us Brexit, resurgent right-wing nationalism in Europe and the US, and a Russian presidency that has more than a whiff of tsardom about it. For some, the past may be not only a nice place to visit but also to live. It is, perhaps, the difference between personal nostalgia, which draws on significant memories of family, friends, spouses, even pets, and a more generalized, dangerous nostalgia that peddles idealized fantasies of yesteryear, of a better past that didn’t even exist at the time. Culture as much as politics has a part to play in this, an example being the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, whose opening title crawl celebrated “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” a “pretty world” where “gallantry took its last bow,” which required one to ignore the 3,500,000 slaves held in the South by 1860, a situation that meant nine out of ten Black Americans were in a state of involuntary servitude. The title crawl did at least manage to acknowledge the existence of slavery, but only in a somewhat wistful manner: “Here,” it told us, “was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave… A Civilization gone with the wind…”
― John Connolly, Night and Day

“More recently, the OED has defined nostalgia as a “sentimental longing for the past,” although this definition is imperfect and allows considerable latitude for the negative. After all, a sentimental longing for the past has variously given us Brexit, resurgent right-wing nationalism in Europe and the US, and a Russian presidency that has more than a whiff of tsardom about it.

For some, the past may be not only a nice place to visit but also to live. It is, perhaps, the difference between personal nostalgia, which draws on significant memories of family, friends, spouses, even pets, and a more generalized, dangerous nostalgia that peddles idealized fantasies of yesteryear, of a better past that didn’t even exist at the time. Culture as much as politics has a part to play in this, an example being the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, whose opening title crawl celebrated “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” a “pretty world” where “gallantry took its last bow,” which required one to ignore the 3,500,000 slaves held in the South by 1860, a situation that meant nine out of ten Black Americans were in a state of involuntary servitude. The title crawl did at least manage to acknowledge the existence of slavery, but only in a somewhat wistful manner: “Here,” it told us, “was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave… A Civilization gone with the wind…”

In 2020, when the South Korean film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture, much to the annoyance of U.S. president Donald Trump, it was to Gone With The Wind that Trump turned.

"Can we get, like, Gone With The Wind back, please" he implored at a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on the 20th of February 2020. One could argue that what he was seeking was the revived celebration of epic filmmaking of a particularly American stripe. But while correlation does not imply causation, by 2023-2024 slavery denial had become a theme of Republican party presidential primaries.

At a town hall meeting in Berlin, New Hampshire, on the 27th of December 2023, Nikki Haley, former governer of South Carolina, replied to a question about the cause of the Civil War by mentioning only "how government was run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do." Including, presumably, owning slaves, though she didn't specify that.”
― John Connolly, Night and Day

“I suspect he knew how ill he was but was afraid to admit it, either to his physician or himself. He was already hospitalized by the time I returned home, would never leave that bed, and only briefly regained consciousness in the weeks that followed. It’s the strange gift that cancer gives before it finishes its work: a few days, or even just a couple of hours, during which the patient is offered clarity and a chance to say goodbye. My father spent some of this time drawing a map of the hospital and its surroundings on the back of a cigarette packet, the irony of plotting his escape with the aid of the instruments of his self-destruction entirely lost on him.”
― John Connolly, Night and Day

“Make America Great Again” is a perfectly legitimate campaign slogan, but it raises the questions of when America was supposedly greater, and for whom?”
― John Connolly, Night and Day

“Wynkyn believed in God, but prized faith over evidence. The former possessed a higher quality, a grace, because it required a capacity to imagine and accept something beyond the ordinary; it was, according to Hebrews, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
― John Connolly, Night and Day

“I embraced the desert, a place without representations of the natural world and where art, when it is found, tends toward the nonfigurative, the decorative. There I stayed, until legal obligations forced me to return here, however briefly.” “And that’s why you asked for the paintings in this room to be removed,” I said. “Now I perceive some mistrust creeping in,” said Hayden. “I can hardly blame you.” “I admit only that it is straining my credulity,” I said, “not shattering it. But a creature, a homunculus, that finds its way into our world through—what, pictures of landscapes or standing stones?” “I have spent a long time considering this,” said Hayden, “and have learned that I am not alone in what I have experienced. Others, too, have seen the flaw. In fact, once the eye is trained to look for it, it becomes hard to miss. It is in everything—this blemish, this imperfection—but most profoundly in art because art is so deeply human, and humans are so deeply flawed. What if there are worlds beyond this one? What if, in creating representations of what we see around us, an artist may, in moments of great vision or inspiration, capture a quintessence, and in so doing, forge a connection between the real and the unreal: a window between realms, or the expansion of a fissure, a gap wide enough for something to enter, something that seeks to be what it is not?”
― John Connolly, Night and Day

“What is grief? Grief is the suit that fitted once, but no longer. It is the jacket billowing, the waistband gaping. Grief is the house that went from too big to just right, then became too big again. Grief is the thing that feeds upon itself. Grief is the fire and the fuel. Grief is a fox.”
― John Connolly, Night and Day

“naqam naqamath: not vengeance alone, which would have involved meeting evil with evil, but a vengeance of vindication.”
― John Connolly, Night and Day